YouTube blocked over a million videos in India between January and March this year

It released Community Guidelines Enforcement report which shows that the U.S. is a distant second with 3,58,134 videos removed during the period

Video sharing platform YouTube blocked over a million videos in India during the first three months of this year – more than any other country in the world, according to its Community Guidelines Enforcement report released on Tuesday.

As per the data shared, YouTube removed 1,175,859 videos in India for violating its Community Guidelines during January-March 2022 quarter. The U.S. was a distant second with 3,58,134 videos removed during the period under review, followed by Indonesia (2,22,471 videos), Brazil (2,11,580 videos), Russia (2,02,743 videos), Pakistan (1,24,457 videos), Bangladesh (93,784 videos), Mexico (77,139 videos), Vietnam (72,875 videos) and Thailand (71,805 videos).

YouTube has Community Guidelines that set the rules of the road for what is not allowed on the platform. The platform explained that it relies on a combination of people and technology to flag inappropriate content and enforce these guidelines.

“Flags can come from our automated flagging systems, from members of the Trusted Flagger program (NGOs and government agencies) or from users in the broader YouTube community. The Community Guidelines Enforcement report provides global data on the flags YouTube receives and how YouTube enforces policies, it added.

For India, the company also published their monthly transparency reports for the months of January, February and March 2022, in accordance with the Information Technology (Guidelines for Intermediaries and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.

According to the India transparency report, the company received 33,995 complaints from users in January, following which 1,04,285 removal action was taken. Similarly, in February 93,067 removal actions were taken based on 30,065 user complaints and in March 93,457 removal actions were taken following 31,699 complaints.

These complaints are received from individual users located in India via designated mechanisms and relate to third-party content that is believed to violate local laws or personal rights on Google's SSMI platforms. Each unique URL in a specific complaint is considered an individual "item". A single complaint may specify multiple items that potentially relate to the same or different pieces of content. “When we receive complaints from individual users regarding allegedly unlawful or harmful content, we assess each item to determine if the content violates our Community Guidelines or content policies, or meets local legal requirements for removal,” it explained.